Ipsos MORI/Standard – CON 29, LAB 40, LD 10, UKIP 12
17 Jul 2013

...and I've said it before and I'll say it again and again and again - from 1974 until 1985 when I left the industry I was employed by a large electrical contracting company (100+ employees in our Leeds office multiplied by offices all over the country) and during that time we never had anything less than ten (an arbitary number from my head but pretty much on the low side) house building or refurbishment projects on the go at any given time.

Some of those sites were for 300 to 500 dwellings, almost all were for local authority and housing associations and 100% of all of those were for rent.

Make a note of those years and check out which party(s) were in power - both Labour and Conservative is the correct answer and Wilson, Callaghan and even Thatcher were all committed to a continuous program of social house building and refurbishment in numbers that we can only dream of these days.

So what happened, was the country extremely wealthy during those 11 years, north sea oil income didn't really kick in until the end of the 70s so the answer is no, we had two recessions during that period, we had years and years of industrial unrest and a depressed economy, we had a steel strike one year that meant that our building trade ground to a halt - but still the housing program continued on a massive scale.


The only difference between then and now is political will, there was a need for social housing, low cost rental properties, even Thatcher saw that (initially), even her henchman Tebbit saw that if you wanted the unemployed to get on their bikes to find work, if you were closing steel and coal towns down then you'd better make sure that it was easy to source new social housing in another town when you told them to move on - even the most rabid of Tories understood that principal.

We could do it now, it would be private housing associations that did it, but we could do it right now, we could build hundreds of thousands of social housing units, we did it when the country was broke under Wilson and especially Callaghan, but we don't have the will to do it now, as a country we are so short sighted and morally bankrupt with greed that we don't even understand our own history.

We were even more broke in 1945



The direct and indirect benefits that another house-building boom would bring totally eclipse those projected for vanity projects like HS2 or Trident

Indeed you have and you are absolutely right.
The twin problems of the housing shortage and the high cost of welfare are linked, both can be relieved by building social housing.
Add to that the boost to GDP and employment that building houses would bring and the tax-take to HMG would soar, thereby reducing the deficit as well.

Either Gideon must have missed the relevant lecture on his PPE course ... or he has an aversion to a) social housing being owned by local authorities and b) Keynesian economics.
I think we all know which is the case.

Thing is, as Mr Chicken makes clear, it's not just Gidiot, is it? It's been successive governments since the 1980s.

The government may have other reasons for adhering to the orthodoxy, but ultimately it's simply a wider ideological issue of a belief that private is always better and preferable, and many of the public believe it too, because the bulk of the mainstream media has drip-fed them a diet of anti-public services stories for close on 30 years.

I think it would be almost impossible to go back to the 1970s/80s when every local authority had a properly funded housing department and many had their own direct works dept (they were in effect a building contractor), and politically it is completely off the menu for all three of the main parties.

But there is absolutely no reason why a government supported, even government funded program of low cost social housing cannot be provided and managed by private housing associations, there is a willingness for this both from the tenant and the landlords and the very, very limited supply of "forced by planning consents" social housing element to every new private house build project is always part-let, part-sold off-plan and its no coincidence that the "forced by planning" shared ownership part of every development is always built first.

What we need is the political will to fund these developments on a large scale just like their predecessors did - maybe they could search the archives to find out how it was funded ?

Again, spot on.



I suspect that few modern politicians care much for history. Wasn't it Tony Blair who (in)famously confessed that he wished he'd studied it? Yet even that subsequent admission provoked no admission that he had any regrets about Afghanistan or Iraq.

Indeed.
The Blair/Brown governments were terrified of appearing to be left wing, believing that the public would lose trust in them if they did, and, during the boom years, I guess the problem didn't appear to be as bad as it does now.
But sheer economics tells us it's desirable and do-able.